Brain Food #774: The rest is fleeting
Some thoughts on beauty, in the spirit of fashion week
Thoughts of the day
In the spirit of fashion week here in Milan, today’s post is dedicated to beauty.
Beauty gives an unfair advantage. In selecting mates, people have been shown to prefer those with certain characteristics that allude to beauty, such as having a symmetrical face. We are prone to like someone more, and think they are better, smarter, because of their good looks. Interestingly, in some countries, including Italy, people tend to include a photo of themselves in their CV.
Italian actress and icon Sophia Loren just turned 88. She famously proclaimed, “Everything you see I owe to spaghetti”.
A look at art, often concerned with capturing true beauty and making it immortal, can reveal its changing standards over time, but also across cultures.
Beauty is not something to be pursued or possessed, nor something to be determined by predefined rules. It remains something to be discovered, often beneath the surface, or in other unexpected places. As art through time shows, the rest is fleeting.
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